First Impressions

I can't believe I have only been here two days!  It has been a whirlwind of learning and excitement (and jet lag, of course).  Most of my fears have been washed away with the friendliness and love I have been shown by everyone.

I was greeted at the airport by Sharron and Li Feng, two English teachers

There is plenty of coffee in the coffee machine, but the most important thing I had to learn upon my arrival, a piece of information nobody told me, is that Shanghai is BYOTP!  Bring your own toilet paper.  I was like, what?  How is it that in a communist country people have to supply their own TP? Even in the United States, the most greedy capitalist looking out for number one nation on earth, toilet paper is readily available to all.  But no worries, because within 12 hours Sharron had bought me a lifetime supply, as well as a power adapter (which I did need, Ben Lee!) and some laundry detergent.  Another surprise is how few people seem to speak English, apart from the English teachers and the students.  But it's also amazing how well you can communicate with people who don't speak your language.  My favorite example is Mrs. Guo, who is the "house mom" of the dorm.  Her English and my Chinese are in close competition with each other (for who knows the least), but we talk all the time anyway.  It's easy to understand what she's saying.

I have started to teach some classes, mostly academic writing and some reading.  This morning, I taught a lesson on writing a persuasive paragraph, and gave out prizes to the kids who were most persuasive.  I was observed by a lot of the English teachers, who had time to observe me because they only teach 10-12 periods a week.  When I told them I teach 24 periods a week (counting conference periods) they just about flipped out.  Of course, their classes are much larger - 35 plus kids per section.  I am currently planning a lesson on the compare/contrast (I know some of my colleagues hate that one) paragraph.  They have been studying festivals, so we are going to compare/contrast (which means to find similarities and differences between) Christmas and Chinese New Year. Meanwhile, I will compare/contrast DaJing and Northwest a little bit.  Students here are just as friendly, boisterous and delightful as my students at Northwest, but kids at NWS are much more talkative, more willing and eager to share their ideas and opinions.  Northwest students think they are stressed out, but compared to the kids here, they are living the life of Riley.  I attended the equivalent of community meeting on Monday morning, which is called the flag ceremony here.  As you can see, it's a lot more formal, with the kids all standing in rows.  Sharron asked me if we had anything like it in Seattle, and I said yes, but the kids were all sitting or lounging on the floor!  They had the same kind of announcements, and I was introduced to the community in the same way that the visitors we have are introduced to us during community meeting.  They also had some awards and announcements, just like we do.  The school building itself is MUCH bigger than Northwest, or much taller anyway.  My office is on the 14th floor.

Can you believe that's a school?

There are only three grade levels - equivalent to 10th, 11th and 12th grades, with about 300 kids in each grade.  They are then divided into sections, with each section staying the same and having its own classroom.  The kids pretty much stay in the same classroom all day, except for PE and science labs (and English classes, where they divide in half), and the teachers are the ones who move around from room to room.  At Northwest, we all move around all the time.  

I have my own VPN, which is working really well and gets me through to all the blocked sites, which they call "shielded."  I had a really interesting conversation with Sharron about the connotations of those two words.  She asked if they blocked websites in the US and I said, "No, but they spy on you all the time."  I told her about how, when I buy something online, I am then inundated with ads for that very product.  She thought that was pretty funny.  She showed me how to get to the metro and I went for a little jaunt last night (after a three hour jet-lag nap) to see East Nanjing Road at night and look across the river from the Bund to Pudong under the full moon.

Pretty cool, huh?